3 minutes. $42m. But is it art?

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Expensive? Yes. An ad? Yes. But does that mean it's any
less of a
film? Mark Lawson investigates.

We might imagine a movie called Number 5 to be a low-budget
work by an austere auteur who regards narrative titles as
suspiciously commercial: the movies numbered 1 to 4 were probably
eight-millimetre experimental pieces he made in film school.

But Number 5 is, at an estimated $A14 million a minute, the
biggest-budget movie ever made and could hardly be more commercial.
In fact, it is a commercial: costing a reported $42 million, the
film - reuniting director Baz Luhrmann with his Moulin Rouge star
Nicole Kidman - is an ad for the Chanel fragrance.

With the marketing of art reaching new levels of intensity - the
stage show The Producers and the film Bridget Jones: The Edge of
Reason are being huckstered like firewood in an ice age - Luhrmann
and Kidman's Number 5 represents the most concerted attempt in
cultural history to pass off marketing as art.

Advertising has traditionally been regarded as a school for the
cinematic academy: Alan Parker, Ridley and Tony Scott and Jonathan
Glazer all moved from corporate shorts to the feature drama form,
and critics still routinely rebuke them for betraying their
salesman's roots in the tendency to make all weather resemble a
sunset.

While respected directors have moved from Hollywood to
product-selling before (Ang Lee and John Frankenheimer made
internet ads for BMW some years ago), Luhrmann is the most notable
example of someone going against the usual traffic.

All the body language of the Chanel campaign stresses that
selling a smell can be as artistically significant as shooting a
movie. When the ad is shown in cinemas (before the new Bridget
Jones film) and in its full-length version on TV, the two minutes
of action are followed by a full minute of credits. Journalists
attending previews were handed a media release more lavishly
produced than many books. The director has said that he wants
Number 5 to be figured as a film rather than a commercial.

Paradoxically, Luhrmann's Number 5 is startlingly free of brand names by modern movie standards.

So does Baz's Chanel sell have the authentic whiff of film? The
obvious objection to two minutes of celluloid is that it must lack
the narrative momentum and development that is implied by the very
word "movie".

In fact, there is rather more incident within the 120 seconds of
storytelling in Number 5 than in many European movies screened in
competition at Cannes and Venice.

Kidman plays the most beautiful but also the loneliest actress
in the world (you sense Luhrmann was pushing at an open door when
he pitched that to her) who, fleeing the paparazzi in Manhattan,
jumps into a taxi occupied by a young bohemian. Boy and girl fall
in love in a series of spectacular tableaux that suggest Luhrmann
is still besotted with his storyboards for Moulin Rouge.

But, even if the work tells enough of a tale to qualify as a
film, the purist objection would be that it can't be a movie
because it is designed to make the viewer buy something. Yet this
disqualification is problematic: the level of product placement in
Hollywood movies is now so extreme that a major moment in the Julia
Roberts movie Runaway Bride is the best ad Federal Express ever
had, while The Manchurian Candidate and Cellphone both contain
Nokia plot-twists.

In fact, paradoxically, Luhrmann's Number 5 is - until the
moment when the arty bloke susses why the actress smells the way
she does - startlingly free of brand names by modern movie
standards.

So, including less aggressive marketing and more plot than many
works available in the DVD store, the latest Luhrmann is only
easily dismissable as a film on grounds of length. But it still
seems slightly surprising that director and actress didn't get
sniffy about a perfume ad.

Luhrmann has always had an extreme interest in form, and perhaps
convinced himself that a commercial was a sonnet as opposed to the
Victorian novel of a feature.

As for Kidman, there's a tradition of actors (from Laurence
Olivier to Tom Cruise) filming campaigns for foreign markets only,
because of the perception that an ad, even for a celebrated
fragrance, gives you a bad smell. But Kidman, who could play any
role in cinema she wanted, was probably interested because the
Chanel ad puts her in a direct line from Catherine Deneuve and
Marilyn Monroe, who both promoted the brand.

Much of the value of this is novelty: Luhrmann and Kidman would
be unwise to make Number 5: 2. What Luhrmann and Kidman have done
for Chanel certainly doesn't stink, but a culture in which this
much money and talent can be spent on an ad invites some
nose-wrinkling. - Guardian